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At student’s peril

Right now, at the is very moment, I am reading “Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology” by Allan Collins and Richard Halverson.

From pg 6, “…schools have ketp new digital technologies on the periphery of their core academic practices. Schools often provide computer labs, tech prep courses, and computer literacy and programming courses to help student learn about technology, but do not try to rethink basic practices of teaching and learning. Computers have not penetrated the core of schools, even though they h ave come to dominate the way people in the outside world read, write, calculate, and think. Since these practices are the bread and butter of traditional education, school ignore computers at their peril.”

School administrations, boards and administrators alike, fail to see the the legitimacy of rethinking how school should be done and while the Technological Age is speeding up the schools are barely keeping up.

School systems who are fortunate to have a board and administrators who understand the pace at which technology is changing education, are fortunate. These systems are not just responding but embracing the massive changes that are coming with open arms. These are ahead of the curve.

The student’s are in peril. How can they not be when the critical components of learning are not, in large part, being used to help them learn. Unless a teacher is technologically savvy up on current trend,s the student in the classroom is disadvantaged to the point of being poor for he or she is not being engaged with technology as a way of learning, but with a mass media product known as the textbook whose print date matches its irrelevancy date. The student is in peril because the pocket computer is gathering lint while the textbook pages are being ripped.

While the U.S. government is at a fiscal cliff because of poor decision making and policy, so too is education. We find ourselves at a crossroads where tough decisions have to be made and those decisions will impact the education atmosphere for years to come.